::A Geek in Korea::

After the shopping trip, we went to another Chinese restaurant. In an offer to quell the source of the revolution, AKA, that uppity foreigner with the Korean wife, the Chinese guide bought me my own bottle of extra strong Chinese alcohol. This was 56% alcohol, so 112 proof? It smelled bad enough that an open shot left on a table would have people gagging next to you. The bottle was a green that is usually reserved for poison. He was trying to get me drunk so I wouldn’t bring about any more suggestions to the tour plan.

No matter the consequences, I did drink the alcohol. One shot was usually accompanied by about a cup of jasmine tea to get my taste buds back to functional levels. Between the alcohol, the tea, and the meal, I injested a lot of water. I had also finished an entire 500 ml water bottle, and another plastic water bottle between all the stops we made at the different locations. I was keeping hydrated to stave off a hangover from dehydration. It turned out, I was a little too hydrated for the ride back into town.

I had gone to the bathroom once during the meal. When we got back into the bus, I was thinking we were going on another short trip to the Chinese “Opera house” I had so desperately wanted to avoid. It turns out it was over an hours ride through heavy traffic to this Opera house. Bumpy roads. Rain. Suddenly, the urge to urinate burned in my bladder so fiercely that I was afraid. I wasn’t going to make it off the bus with clean pants without a miracle.

I did my Zen “There is no need for a bathroom” meditation I reserve for the most dire of times. While it cut my urges a little, the bumpy traffic made me want to let go. It was a mental and physical struggle. I looked at my options.

1. Piss all over myself and have everyone see: Last resort
2. Piss on someone else: Only moderately better, still to be avoided
3. Somehow hold it: Impossible
4. Somehow piss secretly while still on the bus, smuggle out the piss, and let no one know: Best course of action

I alerted my wife to my situation. She offered a little bit of hope by pulling out the empty water bottle the bus driver had give us at the beginning of the day. A small bottle, with a small neck. How would I possibly use this without a disaster occuring? I thought that this was as good as I was going to get, but then I remembered my own 500 ml camping water bottle with a large neck. It’s almost as if it was made for peeing in.

I scouted out a location in the back of the bus. There was a family two rows up from the back of the bus, but no one else behind them. We were second to last. I moved my seat the end of the bus, which unfortunately sat in plain view of the large windows on the bus. I hurried to cover the windows, then went to work thinking about the physics and logistics of the undertaking I was about to do. I had gotten the attention of the mother of the family as I walked pass, but she turned and looked away as I started clawing at the windows for some privacy. Who knows what she was thinking about what I was going to do.
My wife, bless her heart, went to the back of the bus with her large trench coat. Instead of lone pervert in the back of the bus, she offered some privacy for me as she blocked the view of the mother with her jacket. The woman kept her head turned around, facing the front of the bus thinking I was probably doing something entirely different with her in the back of the bus. Either way, I still looked bad, but this was an emergency. There was no time to waste.
I never had been in a situation where I could quanitatively measure the output of what I usually do in the privacy of a bathroom before. I think that since I filled up the entire 500 ml camping bottle, I had proof that I was clearly a desperate man. In fact, I could have filled up the second bottle I had with me at the time, but luckily I had released enough pressure that I was able to wait until I reached the Chinese Opera house. I was actually strangely proud of my accomplishment, as I filled the entire bottle.

I ran to the bathroom at the Opera house, disposed of my evidence, then went to work cleaning the bottle. It will be forever tainted, no matter how many times I wash and sterilize it. The smell, oddly enough, wasn’t the ammonia smell of urine at all, but the harsh tequila smell of hard alcohol. Whatever it was that the Chinese tour guide had bought me, it passed through my system completely untouched. It was as potent as piss as it was as alcohol. I probably sterilized my bottle at the same time as I filled it up. Awful, nasty Chinese alcohol. I always regret drinking the vile stuff, but it’s probably for the best I wasn’t entirely sober for the Chinese Opera that would follow.

Whenever you have a subsidized tour, part of the money the tour company loses to the cheap airfare is made up by forcing you to go to tourist traps. You are on a bus in a foriegn country, don’t know where you are, and they drop you off saying,
“This is a real nice place. Let’s go inside!” You can’t help feel a little annoyed, but at the same time, what else are you going to do?

We had already done the subsidized tour in Thailand, so after our first day full of actual sights and sounds of China, my wife and I expected the hard sell to come. We went to a great park early in the morning. Elderly people were exercising, doing ballroom dancing outside, playing “hacky sack” with a bean bag with a trailing feather tail, and other activities. After we left there, we got herded back on the bus and taken to a tea store.

We were told on good authority by a Chinese teacher in Korea that this is not where you want to go to get tea in China. The overpriced stuff they sell to tourist isn’t what Chinese people drink, so why pay a premium price for it? My wife and I decided to walk out of the tea shop and head out for a nearby park that had huge totem poles you could see from the street. We didn’t know how long to stay out of the tea shop, since they never give you a time to meet back on the bus. Since we didn’t want to be left behind, we came back a little early.

Our guide, who surely got paid based on the number of tourists he delivered at the places, urged us to go in before they were finished to be included in the “count”. We sat in a small room, got told about the health properties of different teas, then had a few sips of the different items they offered. They wanted ~$150 USD for a few bags of tea. Yeah, sure. That’s a fair price for tea.

We were then taken to a silk blanket factory. Here we did want to purchase something for our relatives back in Korea. We got to see them roll the silk, touched the nearly made blankets as they were streched, and saw the result. We paid around ~$100 USD total for two 100% pure silk comforters. We later saw the same items, duty free, for ~$220 USD each. We were happy with this particular distraction to our tour.

From there we went to a North Korean restaurant in Beijing. I’ve seen this restaurant on television before, but it was strange to be there in person. The waitresses are all young, polite women from North Korea. You are warned not to talk about politics or anything other than restaurant small talk. The women can’t answer anything about their lives back home, and if they violate any of their rules of employment, not only do they get punished, their families at home are punished too. This was enough to keep everyone on their best behavior.The food was delicious, the service was outstanding, and everyone was happy when they waitresses started to sing and play music for us.

From there we went to an ice park. Well, it was more like a giant freezer with some ice statues. They had an ice slide you rode down with a piece of fabric under your coat. It was too dark to take nice pictures, and more of a thing for very small children. I went down the slide several times.

From there, we went to a pearl factory. This was the most annoying tourist trap, as it was before our dinner, out of our way, and really over priced. The pearls were artificial, as they took oysters, inserted sand, then harvested the pearls. They opened an oyster for us to see how they dig them out. Someone asked if they could eat the shellfish after they were done. I actually guessed someone would say it before I entered the building.The jewerly was absolute overpriced junk. No one bought anything.

As we were waiting to go, some people that had seen us walk out of the tea shop started talking about what we did. They wondered if we could get out of going to some of these tourist traps by complaining. They wanted to know why we were interested in going to other places off the tour. We told them that our Chinese friend had recommended going to a Chinese supermarket and simply buying good tea there. It would be cheaper, better quality, and also authentic. Everyone loved this idea, and it spread to the rest of the group slowly. No one was willing to bring up a deviation to the tour to the guide however. This would be a serious breach of the nun-chi group dynamics. They actually wanted to elect me as the person to bring it up, but I had to point out I was the person least likely to accurately articulate their concerns.

Eventually, smelling the revolt in progress, our tour guide did come over and the idea was brought up. He, of course, tried to give lots of different reasons why letting a group of people that couldn’t speak a word of Chinese into a supermarket a bad idea. It was too late, and we had already been to three tourist shops today. We got him to conceed a twenty minute shopping spree at a local store.

We set off from the bus once dumped in the parking lot. We headed to the first level of the store and approached the store map. We knew they had food, but we didn’t know how to get the the basement where the food was. The escalator only went up from the first floor, not down to the basement. We grabbed a person and started doing wild pantomimes involving stairs and flailing arms. She held up a shirt and thought we wanted to buy it. Progress was not being made.

We ditched the woman, and the sign, and ran around looking for the stairs. Eventually we found our way down, and got shopping. We purchased several kinds of tea, some snacks, and some fruit. They had TANG at the Chinese supermarket. Why can’t I get no TANG ’round here?

We ran back to the bus, and most of us made it in the time alotted. Some of the people in our revolution dawdled a little too long, but only the people that doggedly refused to get off the bus would have complained anyway. Everyone had a good time shopping. We picked up tea at price so mind bogglingly cheap I can’t imagine how bad the people that had fallen for the tea shop scam had felt.